Such a system is traditionally adapted to receive signals on P different antennas, P being a number strictly greater than 1, and to generate a signal using these P signals received, this generated signal being referred to hereinafter as ‘composite signal’.
In such a context of multi-antenna reception, methods are known traditionally called ‘antenna diversity method’. Such methods consist in estimating, for each antenna, the signal initially transmitted using the signal received on the basis of an estimation of the propagation channel, then in summing up the signals thus estimated on each antenna in order to generate a corresponding composite signal.
A method of this type allows for high performance and optimal reception, in the case where noise received from the different antennas is decorrelated between them. Indeed, in this context, the instant signal-to-noise ratio pertaining to the composite signal generated in this way is then substantially equal to the sum of the instant signal-to-noise ratios observed on each antenna. These methods make it possible to obtain a gain that is particularly important when the received signals are affected by Rayleigh fadings and when these Rayleigh fadings are independent on each antenna.
However, an antenna diversity method presents inconveniences when the noise when receiving the signal on each antenna is not totally decorrelated. It should be noted that, in the context of this document, the term “noise” designates decorrelated noise and correlated noise at the same time, i.e. also interferential noise
The noise received on each antenna is correlated noise, for example, when two communications take place simultaneously on the same channel In this case, the second communication plays the role of an interference in relation to the first communication. The presence of the second communication can be caused by the reuse of frequencies within a same mobile radio network. In such a case, the signal-to-noise ratio of the composite signal obtained by diversity processing is relatively low. The signal-to-noise ratio of the composite signal obtained by diversity processing is as low as the intercorrelation between the noise received on each receiving antenna is high.